leaves

Aerie: noun: 1. A Hawk or Eagle’s Nest. 2. Bob’s Home.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

It’s colder today, and a strong wind blows out of the northeast, off the water, and the last of the leaves are letting go. It’s desperately Autumn here along the Bay. Yesterday the colors were brilliant, at their “peak,” and today they are muted. Tomorrow the leaves will mostly have fallen. I walked the paths just now here at Aerie, and the skin on my face feels tighter, the back of my neck is cold.

The sound of dry leaves and the wind is immediate. The clouds are low and dark—steel blue—layered deep clear past the horizon, as if they’re keeping out the rest of the world. They threaten, of course, but somehow they protect as well. It only took a few turns around the property and a meander past the duck pond and river to let go of the world for a while. Genocide cannot find me here; bombings will not find me here. Invasions and deficits and brashness and ridicule cannot locate me when I’m here at Aerie, and the sky is low like this, and the only sounds are the leaves in the wind and the water pushing back on the rocks, and the geese over the recently harvested fields.  

I left home far more than I should have. It was always interesting and exciting to come home after a month somewhere else and see how so much had changed; leaves either completely fallen or fully alive. I am glad for the places I’ve been and the people I’ve grown close to in my travels. But in retrospect it seems I was mostly out there looking for something allusive, some semblance of peace, perhaps. And today walking up the hill from the river I realized it might be the kind of peace I find here at Aerie. I almost find it here in Spring, working in the garden, osprey calling above while teaching their young to fly; and in Summer when we scull out on the Rappahannock, up the inlets to the west, stopping for oysters at a small grill near the bridge. In Winter, when deer and fox come closer to the house looking for food, finding apples, and I can sit on the steps for hours teasing one fox closer, and then closer still, and she eats a few slices before taking a large core in her mouth to bring back to her den to share with her young.

But it is Fall, of course, when I come closest, and the smell of leaves is deep, and white oak burns in the fireplace, and we heat up apple cider and I can sit on the patio at night for hours, bundled against November, working on something in my mind, remembering the reach from some other time.

Last week I walked to the river and a bald eagle stood in the field to the east where corn had been just a few weeks ago. It never fails that every time the eagles return this time of year, I remember a song by one of the primary influences in my life for my love of nature–John Denver. He wrote, “I know he’d be a poorer man if he never saw and eagle fly.” I always knew it to be true; I just never dreamed it would happen from my front porch. I have hiked in the Rockies, and I’d hike there every day if I could. And I’ve walked across the Pyrenees, through the Berkshires, along the Camino de Santiago where I must return to truly unearth that peace. Yet here where the Rappahannock meets the Chesapeake is where all my songlines converge.

It’s colder today, and grey. The paths are covered in leaves, as they should be this time of year, and my son is baking biscuits and heating up apple cider downstairs. I have some serious metaphorical hills still to climb, but today, outside, I can hear squirrels arguing, and the driveway is covered in acorns. A close friend of mine pointed out recently that to him Autumn is hope, it is life tucked away for awhile giving us a chance to start over in a few months. He’s right, of course, but I wish I could slow the whole thing down. I don’t want things to change so fast anymore. I like the sound of the leaves as I walk the paths, the colors as I lay in my hammock and watch them fall. I find peace in the carpet of stars at night, out early enough in these winter months for me to spend hours looking up, wondering. My anxiety settles down when I sit on the patio at night and hear rustling in the woods as the fox comes to call. I have lost so much faith in humanity it is difficult to write about. I need a breath; I need to be restored. It seems that despite our potential to banish the evil in the world, we continue to falter. But here at Aerie on the eastern edge of Virginia’s Middle Peninsula, something eternal is happening even as life let’s go and settles softy around me, marking time like decades.

Au(tumn)

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

I’m home and the leaves changed and mostly fell while I was away the past week. I love traveling in the autumn, especially in the north, this time western Maryland, Ohio, West Virginia, and the mountains of Virginia. Such colors I’ve rarely seen anywhere else, like a painter’s palette, like a quilt. Like fall.

“I lived in a yellow house, like butter,” Van Gogh wrote of his place in Arles where he did his boldest work, filled with colors and tube paints pushed onto the canvas like toothpaste. When we speak today of his work, it is from Arles we mostly mean.

I, too, lived in a yellow house, like butter, along a country road running past a reservoir in central Massachusetts. Next door was a tall, white church with a cemetery, and the road wound up through the small village, past the Deacon’s Bench Antique Store, past the nursing home, up into Sterling and past the cider mill. It ran up the mountain, winding into the village of Princeton on Mt. Wachusett, where in autumn I’d hike to the summit and look across the New England tapestry of orange and rust, stretching clear to Boston, to New Hampshire, and west toward the Quabbin Reservoir. The crisp air, like yesterday in West Virginia, cleared my head, pushing away fears and anxiety. “It’ll be fine,” it whispered. Well, it won’t, I thought, but for now it is, and sometimes that’s enough.

I wonder if I’m starting to enjoy autumn more now than summer because I’m getting older.

The trail behind the house is covered beautifully in leaves that no step, yet, has trodden black, though signs of deer are evident. They bed down in a holly grove at the far end of the property and walk down toward the patio where the deep, heavy birdbath is apparently now theirs. The front path remains mostly clear as it runs in such a way and is wide enough for a soft northern breeze to keep the leaves to the side. But not always, and certainly not after a good, steady October rain like last week before I left. There’s something so immediate about autumn.

It is the time of year my father died. I read somewhere that other than the holidays, autumn is the most common time of year for elderly deaths. Younger people die more in Summer, which makes sense for the numbers out doing things they probably shouldn’t be, and January through March has the highest rates of suicide.

It’s odd how so many people come to life in autumn when nature is slipping away for a while, ducking behind the guise of death, returning half a year later, slowly. For now, it is beautiful, and the colors reflect in the duck pond and out on the river. They shine back at the hills I walked around a few days ago, and they remind me that for now, just for now, we’re all noticing the same beauty. It’s incredible that people throughout the autumn world all marvel and gaze at the ripple of color coming down the tree line, the scatterings of hues under oaks and maples and birches, and how the white trunks stand forth as the control group so we can see just how fine a job nature did.

I used to get depressed in autumn, feeling the summer slip away, the time of life and the sun on my back. It always, absolutely always, brought me to life, so I pushed the fall off as much as I could, perhaps anticipating what happens after the fall, in the dead of winter when hope is often difficult to unearth. But now I find in autumn something reassuring. Maybe it is simply that even growing old and letting go can be done with absolute beauty and grace.

At the end of The Lion in Winter, Geoffrey wonders what difference it makes how a man falls, and Richard remarks, “When the fall is all that’s left, it matters a great deal.”

Nature knows how to make an exit. She knows how to hold her own. I suppose her last green is gold as well as her first. I am surprised I have been so resistant to change. Maybe I’m getting tired.

Or maybe I just miss my yellow house near the Old Stone Church on the road to Wachusett.

“The Old Stone Church” where I walked nearly every day for three years. My Yellow House is just off to the left of the picture. No, I didn’t take this shot.